PSA: Don’t Update Your The Secret World Launcher, It’s Broken

June 23rd, 2017 Connor

If you were thinking of checking out The Secret World in defiance of the head start launch of Secret World Legends, you might want to tread lightly in allowing your patcher to update itself. Why? Well players are finding that the The Secret World client is automatically updating itself to the Secret World Legends client, a similar but wholly different game in terms of servers and support from Funcom.

Luckily, there is a solution:

You have to download the new patcher from http://register.thesecretworld.com and install it to a DIFFERENT folder. Then copy the files from that folder into your old TSW folder and run the patcher as usual.

BACKUP your settings from %localappdata%\Funcom\TSW FIRST. The installer overwrites some of them.

This just locked some of us out of our final raids. Thank you, Funcom!

%localappdata% is a system environment variable that is actually defined per user. So if your username is Mike, the actual location would be C:UsersMikeAppDataLocal (for the %localappdata part). You’d need to have hidden folders viewable (show hidden files and folders). That said, that’s on Windows Vista and newer and if you happen to be running XP, i’m surprised your computer isn’t slow as hell… But if you are on XP: %appdata%FuncomTSW would likely be the location or (following the earlier example) C:Documents and SetttingsMikeAppDataFuncomTSW as the full location path.

So do a lot of legitimate games and applications. Back before CCP gave Eve online players the current Eve Launcher, game data for patches, cached files, and other client resources were stored in %localappdata%. Since things are different for each person and their device/applications, it’s not exactly that simple.